So… there’s clearly a bit of confusion going on at TSR at the moment… after putting out a shorter than usual magazine in December 1978, they skip January 1979 and return in February with a 56 page issue, nearly double sized, which includes a lot of non-D&D material as it combines both The Dragon Magazine and the wargaming Little Wars magazine. 

They start off the issue by asking readers what they think of this and also by explaining that Tim Kask couldn’t edit the magazine due to health reasons. Well, it clearly didn’t get a great response as the title Little Wars will be dropped from the cover entirely in the following issues. 

Although there is a lot of stuff in this issue of little interest to D&D players, including articles repeated from Strategic Review like an extensive article on polearms by Gygax, there are also really useful things here. One of these is a directory of DMs around the world looking for players, which would certainly be useful for readers as well as an extensive preview of the upcoming Dungeon Masters guide for AD&D. This would still be some months in the future, so the very informative preview was definitely useful for DMs who had been twiddling their thumbs waiting for it to come out. Gygax also gives us a “state of the nation” of D&D article and one of his screeds against an unfair reviewer in SPI magazine. Kind of a unique issue.